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I was pleased to be invited to have dinner with a gathering of former students this week. We met in the home of one of them, a relatively recent graduate, who is using the skillset she has as a performing artist to live a comfortable life which is, for the short term at least, sustainable. A walk through her playful relationship to the economy shows how she is able to relate to the Grid of middle class living AND pusue her art.

She lives in a room above the offices of a web design company. She pays her rent partly in cash, but partly in cleaning the offices and cooking breakfast for the employees of the company on Mondays. She works part time as a historical tourguide. She is paid sometimes for the development of her own art projects. She is also paid occasionally to perform in the work of other artists and in plays produced by conventional theaters. I suspect that she also, occasionally, does other kinds of work that are not related to her art.

We had dinner at the confernce room table of the company and, afterwards, we hung out on the roof deck of the offices, which has as charming a view of the city skyline as there is.

The take-home point, which my HPI colleagues give to the students there, is that it is possible to have a creative relationship to money and to working. The template that our parents lived, of having one job in one industry for a whole career is not the only possibility now. The notion that the only way to have access to pleasant surroundings is to own them is not true. And the assumption that individuals who are creative will not succeed in the economy is false--in part because that assumption misjudges the capacities of creative people, it misdefines success, and it misunderstands the economy.